Does GPL still matter?

LATEST NEWS

Computerworld is New Zealand's only specialised information systems fortnightly.
Subscribe now for $100 (23 issues) and save more than 37% off the cover price!

Get the latest news from Computerworld delivered via email.
Sign up now

As open source gets more commercial, GPL's idealism is overridden by developers' business needs

By John Edwards | San Francisco | Monday, 7 September, 2009

Jeff Haynie was at a crossroad last year. Haynie, the CEO of Appcelerator which develops open source cross-platform application development software, made a decision with critical implications for his company’s future. The decision was to toss away his upcoming product’s Gnu General Public Licence (GPL), the best-known and most popular free software licence, in favour of what he calls a more business-friendly alternative. “We initially started the product with a GPLv3 licence and we decided mid-2008 to move the licence to Apache,” Haynie says.

See: Computerworld's open source special feature

He isn’t the only business-oriented open source community member to have made, or at least pondered, a move to a GPL-free future. A study in June conducted by Black Duck Software, an open source development tools vendor, shows that the Free Software Foundation’s GPL – although far and away still the dominant open source licensing platform – could be starting to slide. The survey found despite strong growth in GPLv3 adoption, the percentage of open source projects using GPL variants dropped from 70 to 65 percent from the previous year.

Before deciding to pull away from GPL, Haynie says Appcelerator surveyed some two dozen software vendors working within the same general market space. To his surprise, Haynie saw that only one was using a GPL variant. “Everybody else, hands down, was MIT, Apache or New BSD,” he says.

“The proponents of GPL like to tell people the world only needs one open source licence, and I think that is actually, frankly, just a flat-out dumb position,” says Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, one of the many organisations now offering an open source licence with more generous commercial terms than GPL.

Alternative licences offer liberal code distribution terms (which means more revenue potential) and more clearly written licences – and they have eager and qualified developer communities, advocates say.

GPL limits developers’ ability to make money
As the open source market continues marching away from its roots – the lone developer who creates a useful product as a labour of love – appreciation for the idealism that lies at the GPL’s heart is diminishing. Businesses that view open source development as a path to a profitable future rather than as an altruistic mission, are increasingly balking at what they view as the licence’s excessively restrictive aspects concerning code improvements.

One suggested reason for the decline of GPL is that its terms severely limits the ability of a licensee to remarket any code improvements. The claims that Eclipse’s Milinkovich makes for the Eclipse licence is typical of the GPL alternatives: “Our licensing is very much based on the notion that we want to be commercially friendly. The typical business model in the Eclipse ecosystem takes technology from the Eclipse community, adds commercial value on top of that, and commercially licences the results.”

The GPL effectively prevents businesses from fully reaping the financial benefits of any code enhancements they bring to a product, according to Van Lindberg, a lawyer specialising in open source issues at law firm Haynes and Boone. “Essentially, the rule with GPL is that the code that comes in GPL, and any improvements that are directly built on that, are to stay [in] GPL,” he says. “You can sell code that is GPL’d. You just need to give certain guarantees and rights to people who receive the code, including the ability for them to pass it on without cost.”

Appcelerator’s Haynie notes his company’s decision to jump from GPL to Apache was made after serious research and thought. “The move was made strictly on a business-case basis.” Haynie says Apache removed GPL’s code distribution roadblock without adding any significant disadvantages. “It furthered what we believe is our ultimate model of monetisation,” he says, particularly “because of the explicit patent language in the licence, which gave us a little bit more [advantage] from a legal standpoint.”

“The GPL guys are very much focused on a particular ideology about free software and all software must be free, even if they have to force it to be free,” Milinkovich says. “There are some people who almost look at it as a religious discussion – the idea that there is only one set, or valid, open source licence,” echoes Jim Jagielski, chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, an alternative licence provider.

The GPL was conceived as a way to ensure complete redistribution of intellectual property, notes Howard Kiewe, an analyst at Info-Tech research group. “That’s no longer a suitable arrangement for many business-oriented licencees,” he says.

[ Editor’s note: InfoWorld tried to interview Richard Stallman, who runs the Free Software Foundation that created and manages the GPL, on this issue, but he demanded control of what we published, so we declined.]

Other benefits of GPL alternatives
Jagielski says that beyond friendly business terms, most alternative licences offer the benefit of being written more clearly and precisely than GPL. “There’s some concern that the GPL, as written, is just a little bit hard to understand,” he says. “You need to worry much more about when GPL kicks in and when it doesn’t and that means, of course, that you might need to get the legal department involved.”

Jagielski says Apache’s licensing terms are written to be comprehensible to people with no legal training. “It is very easy to read and understand, so it is a less risky licence for external companies to use,” he says.

While licence terms are critical, open source developers must also ponder other considerations, including the scope and depth of each licence platform’s respective development community.

“The reason why these other licences are gaining traction is because of the community that has evolved around them, almost as much or even more than features of the licences themselves,” says attorney Lindberg.

Thanks to its longevity and market dominance, GPL has a very large, deep and active developer community. But other licensors are catching up. “I think you’re starting to see a slow push back from some of these other licensing communities, where they’re starting to prove they can build, establish, and maintain a strong community without the reciprocal provision of the GPL,” Lindberg says. “That’s opening the door for those who are more comfortable with these more permissive licences, like Apache and Eclipse, to exercise their preferences.”

GPL changes would hinder commercial cloud-based apps
To force the free distribution of source code, the GPL requires publishers to place the source code on the disk they distribute their applications on. Under GPL, “you’ve got to give it away for free, and you’ve got to give the source code away for free as well,” says analyst Kiewe.

The cloud gave developers a loophole, since software provisioned over the internet such as through SaaS isn’t actually distributed, just run from a central server accessible over the internet. That means there’s no need to distribute the source code for GPL cloud applications. Thus, many cloud developers still use the original GPL, assuming that they are exempt from its distribution restrictions.

“The traditional GPL does not apply to the provision of Salesforce.com or to Google Search,” Lindberg says. This fact hasn’t escaped the notice of the Free Software Foundation. The so-called SaaS loophole is being addressed by an updated version of GPL called Affero GPL.

“It is just a way to ensure that original intent of GPL is met in a new computing environment,” Lindberg says.

The move to force cloud-provisioned software developers to give away their source code for free is making many look for a new licence, to keep the GPL mentality out of the cloud. Amazon.com, for example, uses Eclipse’s licence for its Elastic Computing Cloud service to avoid having to give away its code, says Eclipse’s Milinkovich.

Your alternatives to GPL
Businesses that don’t like GPL’s restrictions have no shortage of alternatives. Major competitors to GPL include Apache, which is using its web development roots to attract licencees, and Eclipse, which began as a project targeting Java developers but has since expanded into many software areas. Other significant licences include the Perl-focused Artistic licence, the Berkeley Software Distribution licence, the MIT licence, and the Mozilla Public licence. There are also dozens of smaller licensors.

“I believe that licensing innovation is positive for the industry, as new business models are tested,” says Josep Mitja, COO of Openbravo, a developer of open source business software. But there is also a downside, he notes, since vendors can easily spend weeks or even months seeking out the best possible choice.

GPL still has a place, given its reach
Despite the arrival of new and more business-friendly rivals, hardly anyone believes GPL is at any risk of disappearing. “GPL code has the largest single, sharable base of code across the entire open source spectrum,” observes attorney Lindberg. “That is a tremendous advantage that is not going to go away anytime soon.”

Analyst Kiewe says there will be places for both GPL and alternate licensing platforms in open source’s future. He believes that GPL will continue to attract large numbers of non-business users. “You’ll always have people who want to work on the big ideas, want to share those freely, and don’t want to be inhibited by non-disclosure agreements and all the rest of the stuff that comes with typical commercial development,” he says.

“If you are a university or a research centre, and you want to get your ideas out into the world, and you want them to be used freely, and you don’t necessarily want somebody else essentially stealing your concept and re-purposing them in the commercial context, then a GPL licence is appropriate,” Kiewe says.

But Lindberg predicts that GPL’s current overwhelming market dominance is destined to diminish as the open source market continues to both expand and fragment into niches. “You are going to see a wide variety of licensing options, as different projects are tuned toward different preferences and different segments of the market,” he says.

John Edwards is a freelance technology writer based in Arizona, US.